As the Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrates its centennial, music director Gustavo Dudamel talks about the architecture of Walt Disney Concert Hall and living in Los Angeles.
When Gustavo Dudamel made his U. S. debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, word had already gotten out about the 24-year-old Venezuelan conductor who had won a major conducting competition in Germany the year before. Glancing around the box section of the amphitheater, you could see administrators from one major American orchestra after another who had come to check him out. But from the start, Dudamel seemed destined for L.A. That competition in Bamberg happened to have been headed by the former L.A. Phil executive director Ernest Fleischmann, and the orchestra’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who described Dudamel as “a conducting animal,” was on the jury.
Dudamel made his Walt Disney Concert Hall debut in January 2007 and four months later signed a contract to become the orchestra’s next music director, beginning with the 2009-10 season. By the time of that April 2007 announcement, Dudamel had become such a star that everyone from 60 Minutes to Al Jazeera chased him for interviews. It was the most spectacular rise in the history of classical music: A 20-something conductor from the Venezuelan backwaters of Barquisimeto had worked his way through the ranks of his country’s revolutionary El Sistema, a social program of music education for underprivileged kids, to become an international star.
Dudamel’s tenure with the L.A. Phil has proven similarly historic. Under Salonen the L.A. Phil had already become America’s visionary orchestra, and it had built Disney Hall, perhaps the most celebrated building of the twenty-first century. Dudamel extended the orchestra’s reach further artistically, commercially and—most important of all to him—into the community. He insisted that he begin his tenure with a free daylong concert at the Bowl that climaxed with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He initiated Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) and Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), programs for inner-city and other children with no other access to music education that became a national model.
Dudamel’s international celebrity grew to the point he was given top billing with Europe’s most prestigious orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, and at the continent’s great festivals. But all the while, his devotion to Venezuela and El Sistema has never lessened: He has continued be the public face of the organization and music director of its celebrated Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra.
Until last year, Dudamel divided his time between Los Angeles and Caracas, but his call for democratic elections led to attacks on the conductor from President Nicolás Maduro, so he has been spending more time in L.A. Dudamel says that he remains in daily telephone contact with El Sistema, however, and he now coaches young conductors via Skype. As artistic as well as music director of the L.A. Phil, he will oversee this year’s centennial season, which is the most ambitious season any orchestra has ever attempted, with more than 50 new commissioned works and an endless array of grand projects, including another free Bowl concert and a new YOLA Center in Inglewood designed by Frank Gehry for 2,000 students.
All this means that not only will Dudamel be spending more time in his West Hollywood home with his second wife, the Spanish film star María Valverde, whom he married a year ago, he will also be practically moving into his office at Disney Hall, where we met between rehearsals for a fully staged production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Next season he will conduct 20 different programs (double the number of the average music director) and a mind-boggling variety, from classics to new music to everything under the L.A. sun. He also has an Angeleno son, Martín, from his previous marriage, who was born in Los Angeles and who gives Dudamel another perspective on the local scene.
Los Angeles is a city that at the beginning you don’t understand. It’s not a city that you fall in love with immediately.
MS: In September you will begin your tenth season as music director of the Los Angles Philharmonic, and you have maintained a residence here as well as in Caracas. The political situation has made it difficult for you to return to Venezuela, but are there things about L.A. that remind you of your country?
GD: The people. I think L.A. is a very awake community, in the sense that you see a lot happening. When I come here to work, this is an environment that is very happy. Everybody has the same spirit that people do at the El Sistema center in Caracas. All the people are very active.
MS: Did it feel familiar from the day you made your U. S. debut at the Hollywood Bowl?
GD: Los Angeles is a city that at the beginning you don’t understand. It’s not a city that you fall in love with immediately. But when you understand it and you get into the community, you love it forever.
MS: What is it that you learned to understand and then love?
GD: Thinking about distances is a little different. Every time you have to take your car, you have to calculate how to go and how long it will take. But thank God I love to drive, because that is part of the beauty of this place. I love that you can be here, downtown, and then you can drive to the beach. Or to Hollywood. You drive two hours and you are in Big Bear. If you take Highway One, it’s unbelievable. The city brings to you the possibilities of everything. Then there is the way the cultural life of Los Angeles is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. What I love most is how everything can connect. For example, we are doing a project next season related to Fluxus [the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde international art movement in which Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik participated], and we can connect with the Getty, which has a great collection of this art. Everywhere it’s like that. We also have a lot of involvement with film music next season, projects around Stanley Kubrick and a John Williams night.
MS: You love the film world, right? And now you are married to an actress.
GD: That makes me love it even more. I have a lot of friends who are part of this amazing movie world, and next year we will celebrate this by participating in the Oscars broadcast for the first time.
I will do a long residency with the Vienna Philharmonic. At the same time, I’m listening to Pink Floyd.
MS: You are regularly invited to conduct the classics with the most exclusive Old World orchestras. In Los Angeles, however, you are free to branch out, so that along with all the standard repertoire you collaborate with performers from jazz and pop, world music and Broadway, as well as take on projects involving modern dance, Shakespearean actors, television and film stars, avant-garde theater and what not. Is that something that can happen only in L.A.?
GD: Completely. Los Angeles is a place where the tradition is of the new. You have to be flexible; you have to be open to evolve. I think that is the secret. I’m now here doing [Bernstein’s] Mass, and then I will do a long residency with the Vienna Philharmonic. At the same time, I’m listening all the time to Pink Floyd. I try to keep my body healthy, but I need this to keep my artistic spirit healthy. Of course, I have to say when I go to Vienna to work, I learn a lot from the tradition. It’s wonderful to rehearse in the Musikverein [Vienna’s famed concert hall] and then to walk to the archives and see the original manuscripts of Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven. I like being able to bring what I learn from that back here, and we create something new. It’s perfect. I cannot ask for more.
MS: How does the fact that you have an Angeleno six-year-old soninfluence your relationship with Los Angeles?
GD: One second—he’s not an Angeleno, he’s a very Angeleno. I teach him what I know of Los Angeles. He’s at the Colburn School across the street from Disney Hall for piano lessons on Thursdays. When I have a performance on that day, I take him to school. We have ice cream from a truck that’s always parked in front. We walk around the promenade. Then we come here to my office. We talk. We play some Nintendo. We watch a movie. He goes home. I do the concert. And now with María having moved here, I also have the chance to see what is exciting about the city in the eyes of somebody new.
MS: What do you like to show her?
GD: We go to the museums. We go to LACMA, the Getty when I don’t have concerts. We walk around. We hike a lot. When we lived in Los Feliz, we went to Griffith Park and the Observatory.
